Lesbian Surrealist Photographer Cahun Feted in Paris: Review

A generation ago, she was an obscure
footnote to the Surrealist movement. Today, she has become
almost a cult figure.

For the second time in 15 years, a Paris museum devotes a
major exhibition to the eccentric photographer Claude Cahun.

She was born in 1894 as Lucy Schwob. Her assumed first
name, which can be male or female, reveals her obsession with
role playing. Openly lesbian, she liked to dress as a man, cut
her hair short or even shave her head.

She was lucky enough to find, at age 15, a soul mate who
became her lifelong companion -- Suzanne Malherbe, who called
herself Marcel Moore. So intimate was their collaboration that
it’s often unclear whether a particular photo was shot by Cahun
or, following her instructions, by her friend.

By a curious twist of fate, the two became sisters when
Cahun’s father later married Malherbe’s mother.

Until 1938, when they moved to Jersey, the largest of the
Channel Islands, they lived in Montparnasse, the preferred
quarter of the Paris intelligentsia, only a few blocks from
another lesbian couple, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

Most of the pictures on view at the Jeu de Paume are self-
portraits (the previous show was at the Musee d’Art Moderne).
Cahun never tired of disguising herself and adopting
unconventional poses. She appears as a butterfly, a cross-legged
Buddha or with dumbbells and the warning: “I am in training,
don’t kiss me.”

Surreal Objects

In 1932, she met Andre Breton, the guru of the Surrealists,
and joined the movement.

From that period date a number of photomontages, mixing
heterogeneous objects such as twigs, bones, insects, feathers,
gloves and shoes. In 1936, she explained her “theater of
objects” in an essay titled “Prenez Garde aux Objets
Domestiques” (Beware of Household Goods).

It would be wrong to regard Cahun as a forerunner of the
feminists who condemn household appliances (and the publicity
for them) as instruments of female enslavement. She was too
playful and ironic for any kind of dogmatism.

One of her favorite items was a wooden mannequin appearing
in various poses, probably inspired by the German artist Hans
Bellmer, who frequently visited Paris. Bellmer’s fetish was a
life-size doll of his own making that he photographed in twisted
postures, suggesting scenes of rape and perverse sex.

The occupation of Jersey by the Wehrmacht, in 1940, jolted
Cahun from her Surrealist daydreams and brought her back to the
real world.

Gestapo Thugs

Unconcerned by her partly Jewish origins, which already put
her life at risk, she joined the Resistance. In 1944, after she
was interrogated by the Gestapo and her house was vandalized,
Cahun tried to kill herself. Sentenced to death, she was saved
by the end of the war.

The Surrealist movement, on the other hand, didn’t survive
World War II. Most of its leading lights had fled occupied
France, and the movement never regained its prewar significance.

Cahun died in 1954, almost forgotten, so much so that the
catalog of a 1985 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C., assumed that she had perished in a
concentration camp. Malherbe died in 1972. They are buried
together on Jersey.

“Claude Cahun” runs through Sept. 25 at the Jeu de Paume
in Paris. Information: http://www.jeudepaume.org or
+33-1-4703-1250.

(Jorg von Uthmann is a critic for Muse, the arts and
leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are
his own.)

To contact the writer on the story:
Jorg von Uthmann in Paris at uthmann@wanadoo.fr.